UNCW officials propose ways to fill research funding gaps

Thursday

Apr 3, 2014 at 3:34 PM

Research funding at UNCW is less than half what it was five years ago.

By Pressley BairdPressley.Baird@StarNewsOnline.com

Research funding at the University of North Carolina Wilmington is less than half what it was five years ago.University officials told trustees at a Thursday meeting that federal budget cuts and more competition to get grants meant the university received less funding for fewer research proposals than it did in 2009. But they also proposed ways to fix that problem.UNCW was awarded $9.25 million in research funding for 181 different proposals during the 2013 fiscal year, said Ron Vetter, UNCW's interim associate provost for research.In 2009, UNCW received $19.39 million in funding for 212 proposals, Vetter said.Part of that can be attributed to federal budget cuts, said Panda Powell, director of sponsored programs at UNCW. She pointed to Aquarius, an underwater laboratory research program that UNCW operated with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. UNCW lost funding for Aquarius in 2012 during federal budget cuts.The decrease is also due to increased competition from both inside UNCW and among other universities, Vetter said."As budgets get cut in other places, more and more people are applying for grants," he said. Trustee Ronnie McNeill also pointed out that it's difficult for a master's-level university like UNCW to compete with an established research university like UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State."It's a matter of success breeds success. They have a lot of acceptance of research that they've done because it's follow-up research to other stuff that's been funded," he said. "It's a big barrier."Among other master's-level universities in the UNC system, UNCW is second from the top in research funding. In its peer group - more than a dozen schools not in North Carolina but similar to UNCW in size and the quality of students - UNCW leads master's-level universities in research funding.Vetter told trustees he wanted to increase the number of proposals being submitted to more than 300 in the next three years. In the 2013 fiscal year, UNCW submitted 241 proposals, a 4 percent increase over the 2012 fiscal year, Vetter said.To do that, he plans to provide incentives to faculty members to submit proposals with other universities or proposals that would provide funding for equipment or for students to work on research. He also wants to double the number of proposals submitted to non-federal programs in the next three years, he said.